Pale Musings

Anne Zenlenka over at the Web Worker Daily has written an outstanding article on Instant Messaging titled How to Annoy People Using Instant Messaging. Wow, I love it. It touches on so many items that I’ve had issue with. It also touches on one or two that I occasionally cross the line on.

Never check whether a person has time to chat. I fail at this one most of the time.  I have made it a goal to begin asking the question “do you have time to chat” before launching into my conversation.

Don’t ever use correct capitalization or punctuation.  As an old time IRC guy I am certainly guilty of this one.  I use abbreviations, rarely capitalize or punctuate as I should and my grammar is non existent.  While there are certain people that I communicate with who live in that realm as well, I am going to change my habits with IM to leave off of the IRC-ese.

Those are the two big ones where I fail.  As Anne says, You may disagree about whether some of these ways of using IM are irritating or not.  I happen to think she is spot on about all of them.  I know that I’ve been on the receiving end of many and, as I mentioned, I have been responsible for at least a couple myself.

Thank you Anne for pointing out what should have been obvious.  Time to change!